4/01/2015

''' MICROSOFT CORPORATION :

{ BEYOND IMAGINATION ] '''

MY HONOURS-Geometry teacher was Bill Dougall, the head of Lakeside's science and maths departments.

A Navy pilot in World War II. Mr Dougall had an advanced degree in Aeronautical engineering, and another in French Literature from the Sorbonne.

***In our school's best tradition, he believed that that book study wasn't enough without real-world experience***.

He also realized that we'd need to know something about computers when we got to college. A few high schools were beginning to train students on traditional mainframes, but Mr. Dougall wanted something more engaging for us.

In 1968 he approached the Lakeside Mothers Club, which agreed to use the proceeds from its annual rummage sale to lease a teleprinter terminal for computer time-sharing, a brand new business at the time.

On my way to math class in McAllister Hall, I stopped by for a look. As I approached the small room, the faint clacking got louder, I opened the door and found three boys squeezed inside.

There was a bookcase and worktable with piles of manuals, scraps from notebooks, and rolled-up fragments of yellow paper tape. the students were clustered around an overgrown electric typewriter-

Mounted on an aluminum-footed pedestal base: a Teletype Model ASR-33 (for Automatic Send and Receive). It was linked to a GE-635, a General Electric mainframe computer in a distant, unknown office..........

But for now, we interrupt, to get back the link of BASIC BILLIONAIRES from the last publishing.

IT BEGAN in the summer of 1982 with an itch behind my knees, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where my parents would take us to see nine plays in seven days when I was in junior high.

Not like a rash you got from the wrong soap -this was an agony that had me clawing at myself.

After the itching stopped, the night sweats began. Then in August, I became aware of a tiny, hard bump on the right side of my neck, near my collarbone. Over the next several weeks, it grew to the size of a pencil eraser tip.

It didn't hurt, and I didn't know that any lump near the lymph nodes was a warning sign. I felt as bulletproof as most people under 30, I took my health for granted.

On September 25, doctors at the Swedish Medial Center, in downtown Seattle, performed a biopsy. After I came out of anesthesia, my surgeon entered my room looking grim. ''Mr Allen,'' he said, ''I took out as much as I could, but the initial diagnosis is lymphoma.''

Then, good news, they'd caught my disease in Stage I-A, before it had spread. Early stage Hodgkin's lymphoma is one of the most curable cancers; I'd drawn a scary card, but hardly the worst. I began six week course of radiation, five days a week.

Halfway through the therapy, my white-cell count dropped so low that they had to stop for several weeks. But by then the tumour was shrinking. There was no guarantee of a cure, and I still felt sick and debilitated, but I began to be encouraged.

After resuming the radiation, I was in Bill's office one day talking about MS DOS revenues. Our flat fee strategy had helped establish us in several markets, but I thought we'd held on to to it for too long.

A case in point: We'd gotten a fee of $21,000 for the license for Applesoft BASIC. After sales of more than a million II's, that amounted to two cents per copy.''If we want to maximise revenues,'' I said, ''we have to start charging royalties for DOS.''

Bill replied as though he was speaking to not-so-bright child: ''How do you think we got the market share we have today?'' Then Steve came by to weigh in Bill's side with his usual intensity.

It would have been two on one, except that I was approximately half a person at the time. [Microsoft later switched to per-copy licensing, a move that would add billions of dollars in revenue].

Not long after that incident, I told Steve that I might start my own company. I told Bill that my days as a full-time executive at Microsoft were probably numbered and I thought I'd be happier on my own.